


In the Absence of Elevators

by Barkour



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 12:15:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam has difficulty adjusting to life as a man and not a beast. Fortunately, Belle is there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Absence of Elevators

Belle was there when he woke up. She had her hair pulled back not in the tail she favored, but in a sort of loose bun. Sleepily he thought he would have liked it better loose. The sun was high out the window, and she sat with her back to it and a book in her lap; she was reading out loud from it.

“You’re here,” he grumbled. His throat hurt. He was hoarse, and his head hurt when he spoke. His head wasn’t all that hurt. He couldn’t think through the pounding in his skull to figure out where and how and why.

Belle looked up from her book. She smiled. He liked her smile. Calm, patient, a little sharp but that was mostly in her eyebrows.

“Of course I’m here,” she said fondly. “Where else would I be?”

He focused, or he tried to, but all he managed was to make the pounding escalate to a wild drumming. He could feel his temper thinning. His teeth ached. He wanted to bite something. Possibly his head.

“Somewhere,” he said at last. “Elsewhere. Not here,” he added. He wasn’t sure how to put it, only that he’d woken thinking she was gone, truly gone, and he was alone.

She was smiling again. “I gathered that.” Setting a leafy bookmark in place between the pages, Belle closed the book and made to stand.

“No—” 

He stretched his hand out to her. There was something odd about it. He wasn’t sure what. It was very small. That was strange. He considered his fingers.

Belle fiddled with the sheets at his legs. As she did so – what was she doing? She straightened and fluffed a pillow set under his leg – Belle said, “No what?”

He lowered his peculiar, small hand. She was looking at his leg and frowning now, her lower lip pushing in and the center of her brow pushing down. She’d forgotten the book entirely. Well, not entirely. She was Belle.

“Keep reading,” he said. He thought a moment. There was something else. “Please.”

Belle sighed and left off his leg. “At least you remember your manners. Even if they aren’t much.”

He stared at his legs. They didn’t bend the way they were supposed to. The knees went the wrong way. One of them did, anyway; the other one was swaddled thickly in cloth and set with two lengths of wood so he couldn’t tell.

“What’s wrong with my legs?”

“The only thing wrong with your legs,” said Belle in that sweet-strict way she had of cutting, “is that you jumped off the staircase.”

He squinted at her. The point eluded him. He jumped off the staircases all the time. It was faster going that way, and the stairs tended to trip him up.

“So?”

Belle’s eyes narrowed. “Adam, you’re not a beast anymore.”

He looked down at his odd hands. Then he looked at his chest.

“Oh,” he said.

“Don’t smile at me like that,” she said.

“Lumiere said I should smile.”

She came up to fuss with the sheets tucked around his chest. 

“Not after you’ve jumped off a staircase and broken your leg.”

“The curse is broken,” said Adam to her. His head hurt tremendously. “You saved me. You came back. You love me.”

Belle smoothed her hand over his brow. She met his eyes, and she softened all over.

“Yes,” said Belle, “I do love you. But I wish you weren’t so silly.”

“I’m not silly!” he would have shouted if halfway through his head hadn’t caved in and his teeth all fallen out and his leg burst. Adam closed his eyes and fought desperately to keep from dying from wanting to throw his own body out a window.

More calmly, he said, “I have never been silly. I have a temper.”

But Belle was not impressed, not by his restraint and not by his sound argument.

“You’re silly,” she said firmly, “for forgetting you’re a man now when you’ve been a man for a year. And then getting mad about it.”

“Maybe stairs shouldn’t be so stupid,” said Adam.

“Maybe you should go back to sleep,” Belle suggested.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “My leg hurts. Read more of the book to me.”

Belle kissed his brow. Her hand cupped his cheek. He leaned into her touch, instinctively scenting; but the intricacies of her odor were lost to him. Her palm was warm; he felt it intimately, without barrier. When she drew her hand back, the manicured tips of her fingernails brushed his skin.

“You should sleep.”

“Please,” he said.

Belle picked the book up again. “All right,” she said, “but only for a little bit, and because you asked nicely.”

He smiled at her. He showed too much teeth when he smiled. He knew he did because Belle had told him so three months ago when a visiting dignitary dropped a spoon into his soup after Adam grinned. As Adam fell asleep listening to Belle read, he was thinking of how Belle had hidden her laugh in a napkin and looked across the table at Adam, her eyes crinkled and shining, and how glad he’d been that she’d worn her dark hair down, like she had the night they first danced.

When Adam stirred again three hours later, rising from strange, half-remembered nightmares, Belle was still there. The sun had gone, but Belle was there.


End file.
